Signed up for affiliate programs. Jane searched for affiliate programs that matched her brand. She placed a few affiliate banners on her site, and has started dropping casual affiliate links in her posts. Stay tuned, I have a whole post on getting started with affiliate marketing – once I get a little bit more sleep. 😉

Published a round up style post featuring other bloggers content, relating to her subject of course. You’ll see later on in the traffic section what this can do for you.

Someone with 35,000 Pinterest followers pinned one of her articles, resulting in over 1000 repins. This post was the number two most visited post. More details on Pinterest in the traffic section.

Traffic and Follower Report

The numbers. First, I must add a little disclosure here. While having more followers gives your more klout and seems like it will bring you more traffic, it’s not all about the numbers, Ashley of Noze Graze said it perfectly,

There are no tricks or shortcuts to getting blog followers. There’s a difference between: 1. Raising your follower NUMBER and 2. Gaining real, LOYAL followers who love your content

Quite often, those are two completely different things. People can be so focused on #1 that they forget they should be aiming for #2.”

Followers report after blogging two months.

Twitter – 400+101

Pinterest – 720+48

Facebook – 375+28

Instagram – 580+192

Bloglovin –45+6

Newsletter Subscribers – 158 +8

Traffic during the first month of blogging

Traffic Graph

Notice the first big spike on the left? That is the day Jane’s round up post went live. She had 213 sessions, which is the highest amount of visits in one day that she’s reached (other than the day she went live).

Traffic Overview

During her first month of blogging Jane had a total of 2,748 sessions. This month the New Blog’s traffic increased by 24.05%.

Top 10 Traffic Referrals

Pinterest has taken over as her number one traffic source. During the first month, Jane only had 250 visits from Pinterest and this month has 720. That’s an increase of 188%. A large contributor to this increase is the repin by the popular pinner. That pin has 1096 repins, at the time of writing. That’s not the only one though. The New Blog has repins with 106, 69, 62, and several in the low double digits (I consider a pin with 10 repins to be a big win!).

Income and Expense Report

Expenses:

$7.00 – photo props

Income:

No income to report yet, but hopefully soon!

Total blogging expenses so far: $216.35

As a food blogger, Jane recognizes the importance of beautiful pictures. She’s been working on building a stash of props to help make her food really pop.

Goals for the third month

Work on Jane’s newsletter list. She’s got an awesome freebie in the works. It’s irressitable and I can’t wait for her to launch it this month. In addition to the new lead magnet, we will play around with different wording and placement of her sign ups.

Work on building a connection with other bloggers. In Dre’s post about the 10 brand building mistakes she made, she pointed out that one of her biggest mistakes was not building relationships with her peers (see number 7). I know it might seem odd to make friends with your competition, but it’s actually one of the best things you can do for your blog. Think of them as colleagues, peers, or buddies – not competition.

Improve photography. Pictures are the bread and butter of blogs these days. Jane is super motivated to improve her photography skills this month. It’s crazy how many hats bloggers have to wear: blogger, content creator, photographer, social media extraordinaire, etc. (oh, and to make things even more complicated, pictures can also ruin your blog if you’re not careful)

Write great content and create stunning visuals. Jane is passionate about providing quality posts to her readers, “I am really trying not to post just because I need a post. Quality content and photos are important to me.”

When it comes down to it, you’re more likely to get shares and re-shares on any social platform when you have great content. We can talk all day about different strategies, but if you’re content is shareable (aka, great content) social media success will happen naturally.

Write a round up post! Bloggers loved to be featured on other blogs, an more likely than not – if you share their posts in your article, they’ll make sure to share your roundup. Don’t forget to tag the bloggers you mention in social media posts. Also, make sure to give credit where credit is due! You’re not trying to steal their content or beautiful photos, you’re trying to share their post with your audience. If you want to use a picture from their post, ask for permission or consider including it in a collage instead of using the picture alone. I absolutely love this post on Boost Blog Traffic: The Ultimate Guide to Creating an Expert Roundup Post That Gets 1000s of Shares

What are you going to do differently to promote your blog or provide better content?

Kristie Hill

Hi! I'm Kristie, but you probably guessed that. I'm here to help you with the technical, social, and business sides of blogging so that you can focus on the most important part of your blog: your content. You can learn more about me here. Go ahead and stalk me Facebook,Twitter,Pinterest,

Reader Interactions

Comments

First of all thank you for sharing this journey with me. I am about to launch my new self-hosted blog (same name, http://www.practicalbydefault.com) in a few days. I went back and followed some of your tips for the “pre-launch”, I am excited to get started. Still crafting my 2 weeks of posts to be set.
Photography is so very important, I am looking forward to reading about that, as well as the affiliate marketing information you are sharing.
This series is so helpful, truly from a new blogger,
Thank you so much.

Great post! Like you I have just started my blog and it’s a few day’s old or maybe a week old already, but, I enjoy seeing progress. I’m curious, how much referral traffic do you usually receive from pinterest? Is there anything in particular that you do to increase the views of your pins in pinterest such as write lengthier descriptions?

Thanks and I can’t wait to see you progress and get to where you want to be! I’ll be following along 🙂

I have had a blog for a few months (half-assed only) and I had big changes, I decided to aim a different niche and I’m changing the name. You inspired me to start everything from the beginning, I will start a new facebook page, too. I will start promoting before going live on the new domain. However, I don’t really know what to post on fb before having posts. Could you (or anybody else) give me some tips how to start?

No more Wealthy in Health? What is the new name and focus going to be about?

As for what to share on your social platforms before you have posts live. Share other bloggers stuff (related to the topic you plan on blogging about, of course)! This does 3 things: gives you content to share, grabs the blogger’s attention (because you’re going to tag them in the post), and starts to credit you as an expert in your field. Definitley check out my post how to have followers before you publish an article.

You could also share quick tips or motivation relating to your topic.

Hope that helps.

Let me know if you need any other help. Are you going to keep your old posts or just completely start from 0?

Thanks for your answer. I have just found your blog so I haven’t seen that post, thanks!

I’m going to keep most of my old content (which is not much), I’m just changing the name and narrow the niche. Originally it was about health coaching for women especially those with fertility problems but I want to change for postpartum health (fitness & diet). The domain will be under my real name and subline… well, it’s not decided yet, fit mom something (as soon as I can find something that I’m not bored with).

I’m really enjoying this series Kristie. It’s really refreshing to see a blog grow from the beginning. Bloggers typically don’t share their traffic and income until they’re getting high numbers. I think it’s good for people to see that we all start with zero.

Hi Catriona, you can work on getting more social media followers by interacting with others in your field on social media. By being generous to others by sharing their content, you’ll start forming relationships with them. That’s a good place to start 🙂

Yes! I decided to spend my day “with you” today! I’ve just spent 3 hours searching for more blogs in my niche and more to follow. I’ve realized I may already have had a good list of blogs, they were mostly pro-blogs. Therefore, even if I commented at every new post. Very few have been commenting back. Anyways, the new blog numbers are really amazing just for a couple of months. I’ll be reading the rest again now 🙂